Click here to copy URL

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Le scaphandre et le papillon (Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

2007

Julian Schnabel

Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny ...

7.4

19,565

Drama At 43, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the rakishly successful and charismatic editor in chief of French Elle was a man defined by his passion for life. On December 1995, he suffered a massive stroke and his brain stem was rendered inactive. In these few bewildering moments, his life was forever changed. After lapsing into a coma, he awoke 20 days later to find himself the victim of a rare locked-in syndrome - mentally alert but permanently ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	A. O. Scott The New York Times	"[Schnabel] demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty."	POS
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, is in large part responsible for freeing the film from its own dangers of being locked in (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Nothing in director Julian Schnabel's career so far has anticipated the sweetness, sadness, maturity and restraint of this lovely movie (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Ray Bennett The Hollywood Reporter	"[It] does justice to the enormous courage and determination of the man and the caring patience of those who helped him"	POS
United Kingdom	Tim Robey Telegraph	"Whether [its] motifs strike you as sublime or a tad gratuitous will be a matter of taste (...) [It] is chic and anaesthetised, and works only up to a point"	NEU
United Kingdom	Alan Morrison Empire	"A poignant reflection on what it means to be alive and, visually, a true cinematic experience (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Tasha Robinson AV Club	"[It] reaches well beyond the contents of that book, expanding its philosophical resignation into a grim but beautiful visual poem."	POS
United States	Andrea Gronvall Chicago Reader	"'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it's deeply personal yet universal in its humanism (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Dana Stevens Slate	"Schnabel has made a marvelous film that uses images with as much grace and flair as Bauby used words"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.